Rails Against The Machine

As the hype about social networks dies down. I'm left with a nagging question: Does anyone actually (other than advertisers) use the social graph?

What I mean by this is what additional value does the graph structure provide to end users over say an straight forward address book or user authorization list?.

Lets look at facebook.
1)Finding contacts.
I am likely to know my friends friends. Thus browsing/searching a 2 level social graph helps me find contacts more easily than say a straight search over all users.
2)News feed.
If I know Alice and Bob but not Joe then it makes sense for me to be able to see stories concerning Alice and Bob (Alice superpoked Bob) but not see stories concerning Alice and Joe.


But thats it!! That is the extent to which facebook has found a use for the social graph as far as end users are concerned. (hardly revolutionary)

Notice also that the whole graph is not used. Only two levels "my friends" and "my friends friends" are used. There is loads of funky maths you can do to extract information from graphs and it is clear that advertisers can derive utility from data mining the entire social graph but I have yet to see a single end user example which requires more than 2 levels of connectivity or where information of substantial value to end users is extracted from the graph. That is not to say that there are no uses just than no one has found one yet.